2TB Flash Drives to be a Reality Soon!

This is simply awesome. Intel and Micron's joint venture IMFT had recently announced that it has produced a 128Gb die. This package combining eight such dies together would be small enough to fit on a fingertip and boast an unprecedented 128GB capacity. This is awesome news as this can lead to terabyte flash drives – thats 1000gb in your pocket.

These drives are said to hit production and shipping by 2013. The 128Gb parts will take longer to reach consumers because in addition to having a larger capacity, they also include a new interface and page size.

NAND flash dies are organized internally into pages, and pages are organized into blocks. Read and write operations occur a page at a time; erase operations have to be performed a block at a time.

Current flash chips, including the 64Gb parts that IMFT has started mass producing, use a page size of 8,192 bytes. The 128Gb dies increase this to 16,384 bytes. As a result, controllers and drive firmware will have to be modified to accommodate the new page size.